“When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows."
~ Ann Voskamp

Monday, February 27, 2012

Marriage Thoughts II

Days blow by and the house is a mess and our friend Daniel, a gracious house-guest who doesn't mind, but not really guest, more like a family-member who doesn't live with us all the time, who cooks tasty food for us. My to-do list racks up. I have not written in many days.

I have been back to Colorado, wondering if I could creep back into the old life for a few days, but then I woke up in the morning in my sister's queen bed because my old twin bed wouldn't fit my husband too. The old life and the new life collide, and our marriage is a means of grace that pours out in ways I do not understand.

I wake up in the mornings and sometimes I am still surprised, even after eight weeks, to find the Pilot there. Joy! Oh, the joy of prickly chins and unshaven legs and I love you. Socks and boxers on the floor in the bathroom, and someone who takes out all the trash, and I look up from my book and there he is, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, husband, forever. Fall asleep beside him, turn in the night and hear the soft murmur of his sleep, wake up, and there he is.

I confess, I am in love with our wedding pictures. They were waiting for us, on that return from Colorado (still feels funny saying "going-home-to-Texas!) and I looked and looked and looked again, eyes hungry to see what our love looked like in a photograph. I make slideshows and put them to music; I post on Facebook and read all the comments; I email to parents and parents-in-law. This is love beautiful, this is love picture-perfect. But love comes in messy kitchens and boxers on the floor, too; in brief goodbye kisses and hello-grins. We danced on our wedding day, but we can dance in the kitchen too, spinning on linoleum in sock feet, skating for balance, giggles.

How much laughter smooths the way for marriage, softens the sharp edges of two lives melding together into one. The Pilot's grins are good for my heart, they remind me that life is joy, thanks to Grace, that cleaning bathrooms and washing dishes are not the things I will remember but giggling to his jokes will be. The daily life spiced with smiles is a tasty dish.

Sometimes I still lie in bed, awake, listening to slumber-breathing of the husband next to me, trying to understand. I am in the presence of a mystery that is awe-filled and holy and I don't understand. "Marriage is living with glory," Mike Mason wrote,

It is living with an embodied revelation, with a daily unveiling and unraveling of the mystery of love in such a way that our intense yet shy curiosity about such things is in a constant state of being satisfied, being fed, yet without ever becoming sated. It is living with a mystery that is fully visible, with a flesh-and-blood person who can be touched and held, questioned and probed and examined and even made love to, to our heart's content, but who nevertheless proves to be utterly and impenetrably mysterious, infinitely contemplable.

I am in bed with mystery, and it is the mystery of my husband, and it flashes on me how did we get here? Is there anything more mysterious than another person? Is there any adventure more unique and exciting and challenging than bringing in another person to the blocked-off, barred, secret places of our lives, and letting them be at home there? We have curtains and locks on our doors and day-planners and excuses to keep all the rest of the world out when we find it inconvenient to let it in, but marriage plants Mystery in the middle of our lives, our beds, our bathrooms, all the places we have hitherto kept private, and it will not go away. Precious invasion! Can I see the Mystery for the grace that it is? I am living with love and pray, pray that wonder, that awe-filled space in the night might not go away, that my heart will not pull back from this contemplation of the grace of the Pilot in my bed, that I will move into the glory and the mystery and the grace.